


Burning your letters

by Charlie9646



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: Alcoholism, Break Up, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape Friendship, Moving On, One Night Stand Mentioned, Out of Character, Pain, Verbal Abuse, controlling boyfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 13:01:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20657666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charlie9646/pseuds/Charlie9646
Summary: James Potter had spent his entire life trying to win Lily Evans’s heart. In one night, one curse, it's all for nothing.Lily Evans is not a trophy on a shelf. She's not just a pretty face. She's more than James’s girlfriend. More than Severus’s former best friend. More than Petunia’s estranged sister. Lily Jane Evans is her own person.





	Burning your letters

Lily Evans sat in her small London home, it wasn't much to look at, it wasn't something to proudly so off to friends about how far you had come, but it was hers, and that's what amounted to something. She rented this for a small amount of galleons a week. 

A pile of letters set in a box at her feet. Some of them were from Severus Snape when they were just children. His parents rarely sent him letters, the truth was the only one he wanted letters from was his mum, besides her that is. So they wrote letters back and forth like the odd children they were, to be able to pretend that people sent them letters every few days. The rest were from him desperately trying to rekindle their friendship over the years.

Her parents too busy to write to her so regularly, like pure blood mothers who did not work did, and his mother at least too out of it from her own abuse from her husband.

He despised his father with every fiber of his being. Maybe that's why he hated muggles as much as he did, the very worst of them was his old man.

Lily was not stupid she knew about the scars that covered Severus’s pale lanky frame. She saw as he dodged blows from her own father that were simply jokes. She later saw the wounds that were self-inflicted. But what was a fifteen-year-old girl suppose to do? Who was she suppose to tell? Her professors? The same, who dismissed the violence that their students inflicted upon each other? Her parents could likely just as easily see Severus’s pain as she did, and they did nothing.

His own mother, who drowned her pain in liquor, and cigarettes? Surely not. The father who abused him? The one warped his mind so badly he felt the need to take a razor to his own body? Leaving jagged wounds behind.

She had wanted to keep him safe, protect him from himself and others. To do right by her best friend. To save him from his own mind. To heal his wounds and to forever love him as a friend, and maybe someday something far more than that.

He could not accept just that, he did not want that. Severus Tobias Snape only wanted power. He wanted to be someone. He wanted to be more than the poor boy from Cokeworth in his father’s coat and mother’s blouse she had first met all of those years ago. 

The only way someone like him in the world that lived in could gain power was to either become a death eater or an Auror. He chose to become a death eater. He chose the dark arts over all that they could have been, and would now never be. 

He called her that name. That name his new friends called her. The one that called her dirty for simply being born to her parents. For being muggleborn, to him, she was a mudblood. He could apologize, he could ramble on, he could beg and plead, but as her father always said what you say in an emotional situation usually has a strong ring of truth to it. Sometimes she missed Severus, more than just about anything else in the world.

Sometimes she wonders what they would have been if he had never called her mudblood the day by the lake. And sometimes she wonders if she's the one at fault for not accepting his rather endless meaningful honest asking for forgiveness, and truly being sorry. Maybe when she's truly on her feet she will write him a letter to say I forgive you. Even if they are never friends again, surely it's time to let bitterness and animosity from school go isn't it? 

With how the war is there is no way to know who will live and who will die. Does she really want him to be dead and her to live with the weight of never having forgiven him? She doesn't have to invite him to her home or life to forgive him. She needs to remove the weight from her neck and the only way to that is to burn all these letters from various people. Send them one last letter each and be done with them all. Better it is to be alone and happy than sad and with someone. 

Next in the box was letters from James, throughout their relationship. All the way back from seventh year till just a few weeks ago. Some were love letters, some were jokingly, others were them simply writing down about the future they had once dreamed of. Now those dreams seemed like nightmares. 

Spending the rest of her life with James Potter? The very idea now scared her. The very idea made her uncomfortable. Someone had told her back in fifth year Potters always got what they wanted. Her answer had been to the girl? ”Well, I am a person, not a trophy, not a prize, not an object to own. Not something to force under your will like a dog.”

The girl just laughed at her and said muggle, silly muggle. 

It happened slowly over time after she got with him. First, it was telling her what they were going to do. Not asking her, just telling. He knew the wizarding world better then she did. He knew the nicer places, he knew the places where the kind of people they did not want to around went. Did she want to be the same bar as someone like Malfoy? No, then she should listen to him. Then they should go where he said. 

It was comments about her shirt, she had chosen to wear. It was comments about her hair. It was crude jokes. It was finding out he couldn't keep his promises, but she was supposed to keep hers. 

It was never being good enough for his parents as she was. It was jokes about her own sister. It was mocking Vernon. Who while she did not like him, and thought her own sister could so much better, it was not James’s place. 

It was her job of working at a shop in Diagon alley was nothing compared to being an Auror. It was her seeing him that horrible night trying to kill a former friend of hers with his own. Because the man couldn't leave it alone. He couldn't be the bigger person. He couldn't just let Snape drink his stupid Whiskey, tell her he was sorry for the hundredth time, and for her to say that unless he wanted to truly change, she couldn't be his friend ever again.

Instead, the five fucking idiots had to try and kill each other. It was the pressure to get married. It was the pressure from his mother to produce an heir before they were gone. She was not even sure at the time the woman had said that she even wanted to be the next Mrs. Potter. 

It was finding out that Sirius Black had tried to use Remus Lupin as a werewolf to kill Snape. It was Remus standing by as a prefect not stopping his friends from bullying others. It was the marauders as they called themselves getting away with everything in school, just as much in the Auror department. It was Peter not feeling as if he could stand up for himself to his friends because he was the tag along. 

It was Remus Lupin believing if he actually did the right thing he would lose his friends. 

It was everything all coming together that caused her to get this cheap one-room flat, pack her things and to tell him she never wanted to see him again let alone be his girlfriend.

The next set of letters was far smaller than the two from the men, who seemed to rather cut her in half than share her. Or better yet to kill the other, so that they didn't have to share. This bunch was from her older sister Petunia.

Tuney hated her from the moment Severus had dropped the branch on her head. From the moment Dumbledore had told the girl she could not go to Hogwarts because she had no magic. From the moment Potter had mocked the woman's soon to be husband. This was the only one of the relationships she wished to repair. And the only one she could do so no matter how hard she tried. 

She cried as she hugged this bunch to her chest. Then she chucked them into the fire after the first two bunches. And she watched them burn. She watched them burn in her one-room flat. Where all she had was a twin bed with a metal frame, a table that was once her mother’s, her clothes, an old chair, and fire to burn the letters from her past. 

She dressed in a black dress that she had bought on a dare, never expecting to wear it. Lily Jane Evans was going to a bar alone, going to find a muggle man about her age, take him to a hotel room and allow him to have his way with her. She was going to deal with her broken shattered heart in the arms of another. A man she wasn't even going to his last name. 

And then she was going to figure out her life from there tomorrow morning. In this cheap flat, that smelled like mold, at her job that she didn't have NEWTS to get though she did have them. She was going to be something other than James Potter’s girlfriend, something other than Severus Snape’s former best friend, and something other than Petunia’s sister. She sent her owl with her sister's letter and two borrowed ones for James’s and Severus’s. 

She wasn't going to get a happy ending with any of those people and that was okay. Because she didn't need one. 

> 


End file.
